Dr. Marissa your Life Balance and Mid-Life Opportunity Coach

How do we find Balance? What is an Answer?

Are you waiting to wake up IN the American Dream but are currently living in a nightmare?

Are you hoping for the Happily Ever After?

If you nodded to any of these questions, you are not alone. Statistics show that even though we are living at higher rates of affluence than we were decades ago, Americans (and other “first world” countries) are at our highest rates of Life Dissatisfaction…what I call the Dis-Ease or Unhappiness with Life. Take my Life Balance Assessment and see what other high achieving successful exhausted professionals are saying in the following Quick and Clean quiz…

Life Balance Questions

Are you tired?

Do you feel like you are a hamster on a wheel?

Is shopping not as fun as it used to be?

Are vacations few and fleeting?

Do you hate your job?

Are you staying on your job because it’s a paycheck?

Do most of the people in your life drive you crazy?

Are you annoyed most of the time?

Do you have a constant yammer in your head of woulda shoulda couldas?

Do you hate your family?

Do you ask yourself often, Is this all there is?!

Do you want to curl up under the covers and never come out?

Are you sick and tired of being sick and tired?

Is your boss a jerk?

Do your co-workers drive you to drink?

Are your meetings a joke?

Are most of your work team lazy?

Is there blatant favoritism at work?

Do you feel like you are failing as a parent?

Do you feel guilty having to choose your work over your kids?

Do you feel guilty about having to leave work to take care of your kids?

Are you mad that you can’t do everything for everyone?

Are the managers and leaders in your company morons? (maybe not)

Do you hate most of the things you have to do?

Do you wait for the other shoe to drop when things are good?

Do you feel like you’re on a swing from feeling like you’re hot shitake to feeling like you’re a piece of shitake?

Do you want to jump off that hamster wheel but you’re afraid of where you’ll land?

Are you constantly ignored overlooked or unappreciated?

Do you wish you could catch a break?

Do you wonder why you’re not happy?

If you answered yes to 3 or more of the above statements…step up to Dr. Marissa’s Balance Bar and order a lemonade… No…she’s not trying to make you drink the Kool-Aid, but Dr. Marissa can help you make a refreshing menu out of life’s lemons. There are many Balance products and services, classes, retreats and speaking venues to choose from.

Take Reality…there is no “happily ever after”. Wake up and smell the roses AND the fertilizer. I myself thought that once I had my career, a man, a child, that life would become magically happy. But the good bad and ugly of life has a habit of interjecting itself every day. There are not-so-positive AND wonderful interactions with my family, there are illnesses with loved ones, there are illnesses in my own body. There are politics and successes and unfairness at work and in my play. That is what life is…a bed of roses on top of stinky but helpful manure. So quit trying to avoid feeling human, and stop immersing ourselves in busywork, doing—doing—doing—often ending in “doo-doo”. After all, we’re Human Beings not Human Doings. Reality is so much more gloriously complex than Happily Ever After. So ENJOY BEING FULLY ALIVE!

Take Responsibility…for who we are and are not, for what we have and have not, for who we want to be. Life isn’t fair sometimes, and people who shouldn’t hurt us, do. “Can’t change the past so don’t dwell on it” seems is good in theory, but what actually happens is like the pressure in a garbage truck crusher…sooner or later toxic gasses escape. We need to deal thoroughly with our pain and anger, and then make new conscious purposeful choices for our present. If we don’t deal with our past…it WILL deal with you, often consciously/unconsciously sabotaging your relationships at work and at home. What is the Balance between denial and wallowing in the past?

Take up Purposeful Living…taking care of yourself so that you are not living in a sea of automatic drama, bobbing helplessly from event to event, reacting reflexively and hurting yourself and others in the process. I have a friend who has, not an answering machine but a questioning machine which asks, “Who Are You? and What Do You Want?”. Self-care begins with answering these questions courageously and thoroughly so that you are not defined by, or looking for constant validation by others. Purposeful living is a kinder gentler approach to your life…and most importantly, learning how to love and find fulfillment in and by ourselves.